the stars are indifferent to astronomy
by moriartsy
Summary: Sherlock Holmes can appreciate beauty. Maybe he appreciates it a little differently than other people do, but well, isn't that what beauty is all about?


_a/n: this is just a short li'l sappy piece that doesn't always make a whole lot of sense. i wrote it because i was banging my head against a brick wall in regards to two other /ilongi fics that i'm writing at the moment, and i needed to take a break or otherwise suffer severe brain damage. i hope you like it; it caused a certain amount of its own brick-wall-head-banging._

_oh, and the title's from a Nada Surf album. cheers!_

* * *

the stars are indifferent to astronomy.

* * *

"Watson won't allow that I know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy, since our views upon the subject differ. I know what is good when I see it."

- Sherlock Holmes in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle

* * *

John took Sherlock to an art museum once. He denied, after some ribbing from Mrs. Hudson, that it was a date, but Sherlock saw the way John looked at him, and he knew.

Sherlock was fascinated. Not by the paintings and sculptures, because those were commonplace enough; he could look at art online or even make it himself if he needed to. But the _artists_ - some of the artists were very intriguing. Sherlock listened to John telling him stories about a man named Vincent Van Gogh, who cut off his left ear and wrapped it in a newspaper before giving it to a prostitute. He read on an exhibit sign about Claude Monet, who became famous only after his death, which reminded Sherlock of Edgar Allan Poe, who too had lived in poverty and was only appreciated after he could no longer appreciate the appreciation.

As he always did, Sherlock also deduced facts about the artists from their paintings and drawings and sculptures, quickly determining who was rich and who was poor, whose parents approved of their art and whose didn't, who was gay and who was straight and who was so wrapped up in their work that they had no time for such trivial matters.

"You're overthinking it," John protested after Sherlock quickly deduced Edwin Landseer's mental breakdown and the cause of it (romantic stress, heartbreak). "Just look at the art - that's what you're supposed to do with art."

Sherlock looked at the art. He didn't see what was so special. It was skillfully painted and colorful and objectively rather nice-looking, but it was still just an image of some dogs. Sherlock had seen dogs before. He looked very hard, hoping to uncover some sort of hidden picture, but they were still dogs.

"Isn't it nice?" John prompted his best friend.

"I suppose," Sherlock lied.

* * *

(If he wanted to tell John the truth, he would have said he liked the art better before. But he knew John wouldn't understand, and he would give Sherlock a long look with a sad face that said, "I'm sorry you don't understand these things." And Sherlock didn't want that.)

* * *

Sometimes, John got angry at Sherlock.

"Those children are dead, Sherlock! I don't care how smart the killer was, that doesn't make the crime 'beautiful'!"

Sherlock didn't like when John was angry or disappointed or when he shouted or got very, very quiet, but he didn't know what to say to make John not be those things.

He couldn't help but appreciate the murders. They were brutal, savage, and unjust, but weren't so many things? They were clever - no one, not even John or Lestrade, could deny that. He didn't _like_ the fact that six children (three boys, three girls, all of different ages, appearances, and socioeconomic statuses) were abducted (all at different times and from different places) and murdered, but he could live with it. He _had_ to be able to live with it, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to bring their killer (infertile would-be mother trying to make multi-child families count their blessings) to justice. If he couldn't look past the horror, who would?

It was important - or at least Sherlock had always believed it was - to have people like him in the world. Ordinary people were so blinded by sentiment and traditional sources of beauty that, when confronted with the uglier things, things that made them recoil in terror, they shut down. They cried and yelled and even harmed each other. They spent most of their lives refusing to believe such things could happen; and when those things did happen, the people weren't able to do anything to make it better.

Sherlock sacrificed the perception of beauty in colorful brushstrokes and attractive women so that, when the world needed him, when the people were dying and screaming and crying, he was ready.

He _had_ to be ready.

* * *

Sherlock was able to appreciate beauty. Maybe he appreciated it a little differently than other people did, but wasn't that what beauty was all about?

* * *

The first time that John kissed Sherlock was a shock.

Sherlock had been kissed exactly five times previous, and all five kisses had been varying degrees of unwelcome.

The first was when he was seven years old, and it came from a boy in his class called Victor Trevor. Victor Trevor was the only one in that class, including the teacher, who didn't hate Sherlock, so Mummy Holmes invited him over to the Holmes residence for a playdate when the school-year ended. The kiss happened in the woods behind Sherlock's house, and it was on his cheek.

"Why did you do that?" Sherlock asked Victor.

"I'm going to Dublin to live with my dad for the summer tomorrow, and I wanted to say goodbye," Victor replied. "Besides, that's what people do when they like each other."

"Okay," Sherlock said. He didn't dwell on it, simply returned to telling Victor about honeybees. "The second part is the thorax, that's where the legs and the wings are..."

The second and third kisses both came from a girl whose name he either promptly deleted or never bothered to learn in the first place. He immediately deduced that it had been a dare because, after walking up to him in the library and kissing him once, twice, on the lips, she said "Thanks. Bye!" and ran back over to her group of friends. They were all doubled over in laughter.

He didn't dwell on it, simply returned to _Gray's Anatomy._

The fourth and fifth kisses came from a drunken Sebastian Wilkes. Come to think of it, Sherlock himself had been drunk at the time - the only time he ever was at uni. They were in Sebastian's dorm room, because Sherlock had been unaware that "Do you want to go to my room?" was a proposition for something more than what was immediately apparent based on the question.

Sherlock was busy deducing Sebastian's relationship with his mother (mummy's boy) from the suitcase in the corner of his room and thus was caught off guard by the kiss that planted itself on the side of his neck.

He froze up, because it wasn't at all like the other kisses. Those were short and innocent and closed-mouthed.

"Come on," Sebastian said as he pulled Sherlock onto his bed. He kissed Sherlock's neck once more, even more aggressively, and Sherlock's sympathetic nervous system chose that moment to do its job.

Sherlock's less-than-lustful response to the business major's affections marked the beginning of said business major's campaign to make everyone at the university hate Sherlock even more than they already did. He didn't dwell on it, simply returned to the cocaine - he much preferred it to the dulling effects of alcohol, anyway.

So when John kissed Sherlock during their walk back to 221B from Angelo's, he froze up again, for a moment. The kiss was small and shy and on the cheek and seemed to be fueled more by endearment than desire, but Sherlock's history of kisses hadn't exactly turned him on to the idea of intimacy, so to speak.

"Sherlock... I'm - I'm sorry."

Sherlock realized he had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

"I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, just... can we - can you delete this? Forget I ever did that."

John looked so miserable. Sherlock wanted desperately to tell him, _no, John, it's not you, it's just that the only people who ever kissed me left, and they didn't care about me like you do, and I'm scared to death you'll leave and I don't want to ruin this._ He opened his mouth to try to make those words come out, but they didn't.

He just kissed John instead. Small, shy, and on the cheek, and the only kiss in his life that Sherlock had given to another person.

When he pulled away, John's eyes were closed and his lips were ever-so-slightly parted, and Sherlock etched that image into the backs of his eyelids so he could look at it whenever he needed to. The moment lasted about a second, two at most, and then they resumed their walk, John smiling like an idiot and Sherlock trying his best not to.

Later, when he was lying on his couch with his hands pressed together beneath his chin, eyes closed and looking at his snapshot of post-kiss John Watson, he decided it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He hung it up in an ornate gold frame in the 'John' room of his mind palace.

* * *

John believed in God. This didn't surprise Sherlock, who had noticed the addition of a Holy Bible to their bookcase shortly after John moved in. He'd assumed it was a family thing; most people who were religious at all were only religious because it was how they had been raised. If not that, it could have been an obligation thing. Sherlock knew that even Mycroft always kept a Bible around his house, simply because he felt like he ought to.

But Sherlock couldn't keep his mouth shut when he found John reading it in the bedroom one night.

"Why are you reading _that_?" Sherlock asked, and his partner smirked at the disdain in his voice.

"Because, Sherlock."

"Because why?"

John sighed. "Why do you read books about criminology and serial killers?"

"Those books are useful to me."

"Well, then." John's reply was pointed.

"I don't understand it. You're a grown man, reading faerie-tales. How could that be useful to you?"

Sherlock didn't mean to hurt John, he just wanted to know what it was all about.

A great deal of the people around him, all his life, were religious. They believed in God, and Heaven, and some of the more dense even believed in Adam and Eve. It was pure _nonsense_, just a fantasy novel written two thousand years ago by men who didn't know what bacteria was, the doctrines of which were espoused and ruthlessly propagated by people couldn't even agree on the racial identity of their messiah. Religious zealots vehemently ignored evidence that lay right in front of their noses and used their ill-founded beliefs to justify oppression, imperialism, massacre, murder, and scientific inhibition.

Sherlock realized he had actually said all of this aloud when John got an angry look on his face.

"Look, Sherlock, I don't tell you how to live your life! I don't tell you what to believe. Can't you grant me that same freedom?" John snapped.

He twisted out of the bed, carefully folded the corner of his page (Sherlock noticed there were highlighted passages - did it all really affect John that deeply?), set the Bible on his nightstand, and then stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him, leaving Sherlock to lie bereft in their shared bed.

The care John took with his Bible coupled with the hot frustration he exhibited upon leaving the room unsettled Sherlock.

_It really does affect John that deeply,_ he supposed.

He picked up John's Bible and leafed through the pages, deciding to take a look at some of the verses John had marked.

* * *

On a dog-eared page that read "Psalms" at the top, a single verse was highlighted and underlined, and "SHERLOCK" was scrawled in the margins in the doctor's chicken-scratch.

_12 If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a foe were raising himself against me, I could hide from him. 13 But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, 14 with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship as we walked with the throng at the house of God._

* * *

Later, John tried to explain, and for once, Sherlock listened quietly.

"It's like this, Sherlock. God is... whatever you want Him to be, whatever you need. When my parents fought and Harry came home drunk every night, God told me to love my family. When I was depressed after Afghanistan, He told me that there was always hope, that I needed to hold on, that He had a plan for me. And then I met you. So He was right, wasn't He? There was a plan. And then, when I thought you had died, He told me... well, it's just always given me hope. Religion, I mean.

"And... and there were always times in my life when I couldn't see things clearly. When I couldn't see the good in people. God has always helped me see the good. He's like... well, he's kind of like the lens I view the world through. God's personal, to me. He's there when I need comfort, motivation, hope. He reminds me to love the people around me, and reminds me that the people around me love me back.

"I don't expect you to understand or to agree with me. I know you don't believe in Him or in Heaven or whatever. But... it helped me. A lot. Especially when I thought you were... Like I said, I don't expect you to understand. But please just know that ━ well. If you don't get it, just know that He found you for me. Or rather, He allowed me to find you. Er - if it wasn't for Him, I would never have found you.

"Don't you think that's... good?"

Sherlock considered this. He considered what his life would be if he had never met John. Or if John had... _hadn't made it_ through their years apart. He considered the emotion in John's speech. And what God meant to John. And what God supposedly meant _for_ John, what He supposedly planned for John.

He considered all the times that, sitting on the couch watching bad telly with John, the thought 'this must be Heaven' had crossed his mind. He considered that maybe the same thought had crossed John's mind.

He considered that maybe - just this once - empiricism and accuracy could be sacrificed, if it meant the difference between Life With John Watson and Life With No One.

"Yes, I think so," Sherlock replied.

* * *

One day, Sherlock told John that he was beautiful while they were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. John laughed.

"Thought you didn't care about things like that," he said, still giggling.

"I do when it's true, and when you're involved." Sherlock didn't laugh along the way he usually did. He was a little hurt by John's reaction. They'd been friends for years and partners for weeks, and John laughed when Sherlock complimented him? It didn't add up.

"I think _you're_ more the beautiful one, Sherlock. All legs and cheekbones and pale skin and dark hair. I'm just stocky and scarred-up. Not in nearly as good of shape as I was in the army, either."

"Beautiful," Sherlock insisted.

John laughed again. "Alright, whatever you say, Spock."

Sherlock huffed. "I don't know why you call me that. I'm capable of experiencing emotions. I should hope that that much has made itself clear by now."

John softened a little, as he always did when Sherlock reminded him that he wasn't the high-functioning sociopath. "Alright. Okay. Sorry."

Sherlock wanted John to know he thought he was beautiful, he loved him, he cared for him, he would die for him, he lived only for him. He wanted him to know the depth of his emotion and the way he saw John and he wanted to tell him about the butterflies that still plagued his stomach whenever John kissed him and the consummate bliss he felt when he woke up every morning and saw John's sleeping form next to him and remembered that John belonged to him, and he belonged to John. He wanted to tell John that he was beautiful again, and again, and again.

"It's fine," Sherlock said.

* * *

From then on, Sherlock made a resolution to tell John he was beautiful or handsome or that he loved him at least once a day. When that plan inevitably failed (he was too distracted by cases and experiments to remember), he revised the resolution: he would tell John those things whenever he felt that either one of them needed it.

Every time John had a nightmare, Sherlock said, "I'm here, you're okay."

Every time John frowned and poked at his stomach in the mirror while he was getting dressed, Sherlock said, "You're perfect."

Every time John got mad at Sherlock and called him Spock or a machine or worse things, Sherlock said, "I love you."

Every time John doubted Sherlock's ability to see beauty, Sherlock said, "I can't see anything but you."

* * *

John takes Sherlock to hear the London Symphony Orchestra one day. He no longer needs to deny the outing's status as a date, a fact which delights a certain landlady to no end.

The orchestra begins playing, and Sherlock settles into his seat and closes his eyes. The music resonates in his ears, deep and rich and full, and Sherlock wanders through his mind palace, looking at all the pictures that hang there, occasionally stopping at ones that particularly supplement the symphony.

He spends more time in the 'John' room than in any other.

He's in a state somewhere between dream and reality when a harsh, loud noise that is most certainly not born of the professional orchestra fills his ears. _Ah, applause._

_Over so quickly?_

He and John get up out of their seats and make their way to the exit. They remain in companionable silence for a while, but once they're in the cab that's taking them back to Baker Street, John speaks.

"What'd you think?"

For a second, Sherlock closes his eyes again and replays the entire day in his mind. John's excited energy all morning, Sherlock snapping at him to _just tell me what you're so damned happy about, John!, _John replying that he has tickets to the orchestra tonight, _we can have a date night._

Sherlock remembers making love in the afternoon, then getting ready for their 'date night', putting on their best suits and smiling at each other all the time. Angelo's for dinner, as was tradition, then the symphony, the lovely music, the wandering around his mind palace that produced so many thoughts of John.

For a moment, he goes even farther back. He thinks about the last several months - no, the last several _years_, the evolution of his and John's relationship, the first time they met, the first time they fought, the first time they kissed, the first time they made love, the first time they told each other how they felt.

He opens his eyes and looks at John, who has a slight, hopeful smile that obviously says he's eager to hear that Sherlock liked it.

Sherlock leans over and kisses John, soft and innocent but lingering, and then pulls away, and John has the same expression on his face that he did when Sherlock did that for the very first time. Eyes closed, lips parted, cheeks flushed, perfect.

John opens his eyes.

Sherlock leans in close and whispers into his partner's ear, "It was beautiful."

* * *

_a/n: well, that's all i got, hope you liked it, lol smiley face kiss kiss hug, etc._


End file.
